As a young physician in the 1960's, Dr. Floyd E. Bloom was part of the team from the National Institutes of Health that uncovered the principles behind the drugs that are now used to treat depression.

Since then, he has been the director of behavioral neurobiology at the Salk Institute, the chairman of the neuropharmacology department at the Scripps Research Institute and the chief of the neuropharmacology laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Now, he is the chairman of Neurome, a San Diego company involved in brain research.

Throughout his career, he has been looking at chemicals and the ways they affect the nervous system.

Dr. Bloom, who is 66, has often been active in places where the skills of science and politics intersect. From 1995 to 2000, he was editor in chief of Science magazine.

He spoke with an interviewer here after giving a lecture on health care policy.

Q. You call yourself a physician-scientist. Did you ever actually practice medicine?

A. I was an intern and resident for two years after my medical degree, Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. I loved it. My father's dream had always been for me to become a physician. This had been his dream for himself. But because of poverty and discrimination in medical schools at that time, he became a pharmacist. In his mind, if you were a doctor, you had an infallible occupation. And he wanted that for me.

I trusted my father, Jack Bloom. I understood where he was coming from. He was very concerned with the anti-Semitic experiences he had experienced in Minnesota, where he'd grown up in the 1920's. He moved his family to Texas because he thought it was the land of opportunity. And he was successful there.

I couldn't argue with his success. I went to medical school. When I graduated, my father gave me prescription pads for his Gaston Avenue pharmacy with ''Floyd E. Bloom, M.D.'' printed on them. He never got a prescription from me to fill. Not for anyone.

Q. What led you away from practicing medicine?

A. I discovered research. After my residency, in 1962, I went to the National Institutes of Health as a research associate there. It was my intention to compete to be chief resident of ward medicine when I returned to Barnes. Spending a few years at the N.I.H. was the accepted route to that. But at the N.I.H., I got hooked on brain research. I never got back to St. Louis.

At the N.I.H., I was assigned to the National Institute of Mental Health research program led by Dr. Seymour Kety, a pioneer in the biochemical aspects of depression. He developed the first realistic description of how the brain's chemistry changed during depression. Five years later, one of Dr. Kety's colleagues, Dr. Julius Axelrod, figured out how the initial antidepressant drugs might work, by bolstering the levels of the neurotransmitters that Dr. Kety's thesis had predicted were deficient.

Q. Is it accurate to say that you were present at the birth of modern psychopharmacology?

A. Yes. And it was so inspiring to be there. You felt you had the whole world in front of you.

A. Reserpine, an herb from India, used to treat people with high blood pressure. The drug had a nasty side effect. About 20 percent of the people who took it became seriously depressed. Laboratory rats given it also became depressed.

In those days, nobody knew what norepinephrine, one of the neurotransmitters related to depression, did in the brain of humans or rats. Now, if you gave an animal reserpine, it got depressed. And if at that point you ground up the brain, you could determine what the chemical differences were.

You saw that norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin were all greatly diminished in the animal's brain. Then, when you gave the animal reserpine and it eventually recovered from its depression, you discovered that the neurotransmitters had been replenished.

This eventually led to the current class, or serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors, the Prozac-like compounds that so many people take today.

Q. As a witness-participant to one revolution, how did you react when the human genome was mapped?

A. I felt this is the great story of my time. The world of medicine and health will change because of it. Instead of diagnosing people after they have begun to experience illness, we will, at some point in the future, be able to predict who is likely to be vulnerable to a problem. For a physician to be able to stop something from going wrong is much better than trying to fix something once it has gone wrong.

Many of the most frequently occurring diseases such as Alzheimer's and depression have genetic aspects. By pursuing genomic clues, we will be able to figure out interactions and maybe delay the onsets of these conditions.

Yet as astounding as this breakthrough is, my big fear is that the health care delivery system is in such crisis that we may not be able to translate the fruits of this revolution to everyday medical practices.

A. Despite all the advances, we cannot afford to pay for the new technologies because of how we deliver health care, through a patchwork system that includes H.M.O.'s, Medicare, Medicaid. And that is falling apart in front of our eyes. The current system is under such duress that it is unable to accept the new medications and therapies of the future, which are going to be tailored to people's particular genetic problems and will be expensive.

At this moment, because of rising insurance costs, some specialties -- obstetrics, radiology, neurosurgery -- are seriously understaffed. Nationally, we're short a million nurses.

If you add this to other systemwide problems such as the poor handling of information and the loss of consistent patient-doctor relationships and the failure to educate physicians in preventive medicine, I see a failing system.

Q. Why does health care policy concern researchers in a laboratory?

A. I can speak personally. My dedication to bench work has been predicated on the belief we'd always have a pipeline for translating scientific advances into medical practice.

I always thought discoveries would be made, and then there'd be clinical trials, and the results would be handed off to the system. Well, the present system simply does not work well enough to do that anymore.

I see this every day in my wife, Jody Corey-Bloom, and her practice. She is a dedicated neurologist. Yet she spends most of the time allotted for contact with patients trying to get their insurance providers to allow the treatments she knows are most needed and completing endless paperwork to keep benefits coming.

Her worst fears are confirmed every time a clerk with barely a high school education vetoes her recommended treatment because another medicine may be less costly, in the short term.

Watching her, I can see the stress on practitioners and patients. So when I gave my speech as the outgoing president of the A.A.A.S., I decided to use the opportunity to call for a national commission to restore the American health system. The idea is to get patients, providers, insurers, employers, caregivers and physicians together to think about the future of medicine.

Q. Would another commission on the health care system be different from the countless panels of the past?

A. Quite honestly, I proposed this commission because I wanted to state that we can't keep tinkering with the system.

President Bush has been primarily focused on two proposals for the health care system, limiting malpractice rewards for pain and suffering and providing a pharmaceutical benefit for the elderly, especially if they are willing to adapt to some kind of private insurance.

Frankly, I'd like for us to consider health care to be regarded as something like a public utility. To me, if we agree that universal coverage is something to be desired, is that really much different than the fact that we've all agreed that everyone in the country is entitled to have electricity, water, telephone connections, if they can pay for it. We have all kinds of ways to help people get those basic provisions of life.

And health benefits could be viewed in exactly that same utilitarian way. It could be a corporate network like water power and electricity, with regulatory agencies that set the rates for profit.

Q. What do you think of the health care reform plan offered by a Democratic presidential candidate, Richard Gephardt?

A. Representative Gephardt is quoted in the media as proposing a very expensive plan to provide universal access for those presently employed but uncovered. And if that's correct, then it would be yet another patch to give access to an overloaded, understaffed system while doing nothing for prevention or public health needs, renewal of nursing and physician shortages and ignoring self-responsibility for individual health maintenance.

Q. Let's return to your father. Do you find it ironic that for most of your career you have been working in research related to pharmacology?

A. It's not ironic. It's more like I was predestined. I was always attracted to the chemical principle that you could alter physiology. That was the basis of my dad's business, right? Giving medications that could help people's symptoms. To me pharmacology is the bridge between the very basic sciences and the clinical sciences.

Listen, I've had a great time in my career, a great time. I've been a physician, researcher, editor. And right now, I dabble at trying to do biotech business. I have a small company doing mouse brain research. But I've loved everything I have done. Very few people can say that of 45 years of work.

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A version of this interview appears in print on May 6, 2003, on Page F00005 of the National edition with the headline: A CONVERSATION WITH: FLOYD BLOOM; A Zealous Quest for Chemicals to Heal Ailing Brains. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe